Financial Transparency Coalition

On Monday, amid much fanfare, Switzerland signed a revised double tax treaty with India, concerning exchange of information between the two jurisdictions (for general background on what tax treaties and TIEAs are, see here.) Recently, we blogged Indian concerns about the OECD's standard of information exchange, and we have written extensively on the OECD standards themselves, calling them woefully inadequate and noting that they are emphtically not, as the OECD likes to assert, the "internationally accepted standard." It may be a sign of the pressures that developing countries are under that...

A black-market financial investigation spreading from Iran to Sudan, London and Cuba began in a cluttered fifth-floor cubicle in an old-school district attorney's office in Manhattan featuring dark corridors and frosted glass.

What if there is a way to directly fund development that doesn’t involve foreign aid or philanthropy? A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, written by the finance ministers of France, Japan, and Belgium, proposes just this. The authors suggest using innovative financing—which uses small taxes on large financial transactions, like purchases of airline tickets—to mobilize resources for development initiatives. Just how small can these taxes be? Recently, the Taskforce on Financial Transaction for Development reported that a levy of 5 cents on every $1,000 traded on the foreign exchange market could bring in more than $30...

Our friends at Revenue Watch have just finished translating the Publish What You Pay / Country-by-Country Reporting provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform legislation into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. Section 1504 of the recent Dodd-Frank Act requires country-by-country and project-by-project reporting by all extractive companies listed on the SEC. Read / download (PDF) the translations below:

• Arabic | عربي
• Chinese | 中文
• French | Français
• Russian | Русский
• Spanish | Español